Death Note Extended Trailer now Online

An extended trailer for the live action Netflix adaptation of the popular Anime, Death Note, is now on YouTube.

The original Manga follows the story of Light Yagami who finds a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it, as long as the writer has seen that person’s face. The notebook’s original owner Ryuk tells Light that he dropped it into the human world because he was bored and intends the book to be used to kill criminals to make the world a better place.

The film stars Nat Wolff as Light Turner and Margaret Qualley as Mia Sutton, a young girl who decides to help Light in his quest to rid the world of criminals. It also stars Keith Stanfield as L, Paul Nakauchi as Watari, Shea Whigham as James Turner and Willem Dafoe as the voice of Ryuk.

This is not the first time Death Note has received the live action treatment. In 2006 Shūsuke Kaneko directed two films based on the property which mainly had a Japanese release, although they played briefly in the USA. Fans of the series have raised concerns that the new adaptation looks to be unfaithful to the source material. Director Adam Wingard addressed concerns that it was too American:

It’s one of those things where the harder I tried to stay 100 percent true to the source material, the more it just kind of fell apart… You’re in a different country, you’re in a different kind of environment, and you’re trying to also summarise a sprawling series into a two-hour-long film. For me, it became about what do these themes mean to modern day America, and how does that affect how we tell the story